Comprehension beats friction reduction

It became an assumption that it should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. If your software stops me and asks me to make a decision and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid.

For most creators of products, there are a handful of cases where reducing friction really matters - user registration, authentication, checkout flows. But for most unique parts of any application, the challenge is going to be comprehension inside of friction.

What we realized when we ran this experiment is DAUs moved not one bit. The users that we were capturing were the least engaged users imaginable.

Duolingo tested adding an opt-out button to their streak goal feature, where users commit to maintaining daily learning streaks of specific lengths.

It was a huge win to let them do that. The learning here was that this intentionality of saying, no, I want it was where we were getting so much of the engagement from this feature.